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The first hurdle was cleared in the spring of 1998. In the middle of "Monica-gate," Clinton signed a secret memorandum of notification ? informally called a "finding" ? that explicitly allowed the CIA and other U.S. armed forces to take actions that might lead to bin Laden's death. Before the finding was signed, the military and the CIA were supposed to avoid any action that might, conceivably, result in the death of bin Laden or other targeted persons. Unfortunately, the finding was not a death warrant. Clinton's order did not overturn a long-standing ban on political assassinations. The legal distinction was Clintonesque: Bin Laden could be killed accidentally, but not on purpose. So, a covert team could accidentally shoot bin Laden in the crossfire, but not aim at him. At least inside America's increasingly rule-laden intelligence services, this was seen as a major bureaucratic step forward. Operatives no longer had to avoid actions that might set off a chain of events that might possibly result in bin Laden's death. If bin Laden was killed, the covert team would have little to fear from military or Justice Department lawyers. Ordinarily, if a covert operation turned lethal, a federal criminal investigation could be launched.

Bill Clinton gave the CIA instructions to get Osama Bin Laden dead or alive, but lacked sufficient information or international support to carry the order out, the former US president said this weekend.Government sources have said the Clinton administration gave the Central Intelligence Agency approval to conduct covert operations targeting bin Laden in 1998, following the bombings that year of two US embassies in east Africa.

Echoing President George Bush's approach, if not his words, Mr Clinton said: "At the time we did everything we can do. I authorised the arrest and, if necessary, the killing of Osama bin Laden and we actually made contact with a group in Afghanistan to do it.

...Bush is either an incompetent fool who has no idea what he is doing, or that he is devious and calculating. Which is it?

This is not legal advice. You are not a client. I'm not even an attorney. If you want legal advice, contact an attorney admitted to your jurisdiction's bar. What I am saying here is probably 100% wrong and if you do anything in reliance upon it, you are a blithering idiot who deserves whatever bad shit is very likely to befall you.

Okay, now that the requisite idiot-proofing is out of the way . . .

The US Supreme Court passed on this issue a long time ago. The case was Brady v. Maryland 373 US 83 (1963). Quoth the headnote from the opinion:

Suppression by the prosecution of evidence favorable to an accused who has requested it violates due process where the evidence is material either to guilt or to punishment, irrespective of the good faith or bad faith of the prosecution. Pp. 86-88.

I have a hard time believing our government invaded a country to get rid of weapons that never existed..stranger things have happened.

Never existed? Tell that to the 750,000 Iranians who died because of those weapons that *never existed*. Tell that to the U.S. companies like Dow that were granted liscenses (over 170 of them) to sell Salmonella, botulism, and antrax to Iraq. Or the thousands of Kurds who were gassed before the first gulf war.

Maybe you need to read up a littleon what was going on in the 80's, since you obviously weren't around.

Dumbasses like you need to stay on IRC.

The shredder is a media-created myth.

And let me see if I've got this straight. Saddam was a brutal ruler for over two decades. He gassed an ethnic minority with gas provided by the US (Reagan was President, Rumsfeld was SecDef) sprayed from US-provided helicopters.

Saddam filled the infamous mass graves with Shi'a encouraged to rise up against him by George HW Bush, who left them to die when they heeded him and called on him for aid.

Go spin your wheel of justifications for war in Iraq and let me know what you hit. Remember, WMD is out, and apparently so is liberation, since you don't give a shit about those people.

EVERY basic military trainee is drilled on the UCMJ (Uniform Code Of Military Justice).

Are private contractors considered military trainees?

From the Gaurdian:

Torin Nelson, who served as a military intelligence officer at Guantánamo Bay before moving to Abu Ghraib as a private contractor last year, blamed the abuses on a failure of command in US military intelligence and an over-reliance on private firms. He alleged that those companies were so anxious to meet the demand for their services that they sent "cooks and truck drivers" to work as interrogators.
[stuff deleted]
"A unit goes out on a raid and they have a target and the target is not available; they just grab anybody because that was their job," Mr Nelson said, referring to counter-insurgency operations in Iraq. "The troops are under a lot of stress and they don't know one guy from the next. They're not cultural experts. All they want is to count down the days and hopefully go home. They take it out on the nearest person they can't understand."

"I've read reports from capturing units where the capturing unit wrote, "the target was not at home. The neighbour came out to see what was going on and we grabbed him," he said.

According to Mr Nelson's account, the victims' very innocence made them more likely to be abused, because interrogators refused to believe they could have been picked up on such arbitrary grounds.

I see a lot of Americans accusing Iran, Russia, and Pakistan of not adequately guarding their nuclear materials adequately. But what about the nuclear facilities in Iraq, which are apparently being left unguarded altogether by the American occupation forces? And consequently, what about the American justification for the invasion of Iraq as preventing these materials being transferred to terrorists?

The Guardian has actually published an analysis of the authenticity of several photos published in the Mirror.

The FBI WANTED to investigate the Bin Ladens before the 9/11 attacks because they suspected a plot. However, Bush and his administration blocked the investigation for unknown reasons. A head FBI official even resigned because he was so frustrated that they couldn't investiage what they say clearly as troublesome activities.

http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=103&row =0

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4 293682,00.html

http://www1.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/ar ticleshow?art_id=1030259305

http://dir.salon.com/politics/feature/2001/09/12/b ush/index.html

Don't blame the FBI for not investigating, blame the justice department and the higher ups.

This was after the global cooling fad. The chicken littles were adopting their new global warming fad. Now, the new ice age fad is starting:

Thaw in Greenland Threatens New Ice Age" (this one is kind of funny, it combines global warming with global cooling).

Are We on the Brink of a New Little Ice Age?. From the Woods Hole institute. You will probably dismiss this as a right-wing think tank.

Ice Age Now!. Kind of nutty. Just like the global-warming kooks.

Here's one of the old ones The Cooling World (1975). The scientists quoted are from NOAA. True to the fad cycle, there are no NOAA scientists on the global warming bandwagon.

OK, not yet in the US, but there are cases of Church sanctioned lying out there:

Condoms are made with holes that allow AIDS to pass through. As if the original claim wasn't bad enough, read to the bottom and note that there is (admittedly hearsay) claims that people are being told that condoms are laced with AIDS in the first place.

Or, if you want a little closer to home, you can see what people think about Bush's abstinence-only sex ed drive:
How we look and act abroad

Admittedly Fox News, but opens with a great quote: "(Abstinence education) tells teens they have a choice," said Jennifer Marshall, family issues director for the Heritage Foundation ... and what would this be, a choice between no sex, and ignorant unprotected sex?

I only have ancedotal evidence for this (my boss's wife is an OB/GYN) but there are people out there who at least make a good show of ignorance about their own body. His wife has seen patients who apparently didn't know that they don't pee from their vagina. Some who didn't know that they were pregnant at late stages - with high obesity rates, who notices a few extra pounds around the middle? Hormone treatments, The Pill, and the crap in our environment already mess with periods, even more so in young people who haven't established a regular enough cycle to notice missing a month or two yet.

OK, not yet in the US, but there are cases of Church sanctioned lying out there:

Condoms are made with holes that allow AIDS to pass through. As if the original claim wasn't bad enough, read to the bottom and note that there is (admittedly hearsay) claims that people are being told that condoms are laced with AIDS in the first place.

Or, if you want a little closer to home, you can see what people think about Bush's abstinence-only sex ed drive:
How we look and act abroad

Admittedly Fox News, but opens with a great quote: "(Abstinence education) tells teens they have a choice," said Jennifer Marshall, family issues director for the Heritage Foundation ... and what would this be, a choice between no sex, and ignorant unprotected sex?

I only have ancedotal evidence for this (my boss's wife is an OB/GYN) but there are people out there who at least make a good show of ignorance about their own body. His wife has seen patients who apparently didn't know that they don't pee from their vagina. Some who didn't know that they were pregnant at late stages - with high obesity rates, who notices a few extra pounds around the middle? Hormone treatments, The Pill, and the crap in our environment already mess with periods, even more so in young people who haven't established a regular enough cycle to notice missing a month or two yet.

It has been determined recently that Stonehenge was a giant vagina.

One aspect of Postal 2 that I haven't seen in other crime-centric games is the ability to forcibly enter a suburban home. That, itself, is a step beyond the acts of personal violation we've seen in other titles. GTA-3 allows you to eject an adult from his car and take it for your own. I feel relatively safe when I'm in my car; and I'd feel relatively well-violated if someone snatched me from it. But I imagine that's nothing compared to being abducted (or otherwise intruded upon) in the sanctity of my own home. (Violation of person would be an even more extreme example.)

Postal 2's creators believe there's an appeal in the act of violating another human being. A Clockwork Orange shows us a group of people who enjoy this; their behavior is perfectly believable. The 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment shows us that the capacity for cruelty and abuse of control can exist in all of us. Games like Thief (audio/flash) distance us from this by changing the setting somewhat. In breaking into those medieval homes, there exists the sense of being somewhere I shouldn't, but I never really felt like I was terrifying anyone. Knowing what we do about human nature, would the Thief series sell even better if the victims were people from our own experience?

The consensus here seems to be that Running With Scissors will not gain much by porting the title to Linux. Would an improvement to gameplay make a title centering on home-invasion more interesting?

According to the article, especially the better one, it really seems like this does grow the roots as well as stimulates jaw bone growth.

I've worked at Amazon, Sun, NVidia and SGI. This summer, I'm completing my Ph.D. in math (my web page is http://www.math.mcgill.ca/loisel/) Starting October 1st, I will be at the University of Geneva. Why not University of Washington (say)? Because of crap like this and this and this and this and this and this and so on.

It's a fucked up country.

It also answers the first question that came to my mind -- how does a molar or incisor get specified? Apparently, the different teeth form in the same dish and are then identified and sorted before transplantation. And the stem cells come from the patient, not from fetuses, BTW.

The article I read said the stem cells were taken from the patient... I doubt that they're planning on replacing teeth in unborn foetuses.

Really?

I always thought it was because they undercut the local competition and strong-armed their suppliers.

Have a look here (Yes, its a Larouche, site. . .we don't need any Ad Hominems) and here for some info.

The Catholic Church is telling people in countries stricken by Aids not to use condoms because they have tiny holes in them through which HIV can pass - potentially exposing thousands of people to risk.

The church is making the claims across four continents despite a widespread scientific consensus that condoms are impermeable to HIV.

A senior Vatican spokesman backs the claims about permeable condoms, despite assurances by the World Health Organisation that they are untrue.

Article from the Guardian with more details

Personally, I don't see this turning into much. Claims like this have been made before, without much coming of it. The details are short, which is generally not a good sign for something like this.

Actually, ANPR started as far back as 1997 by the City of London Police as a method to counter terrorist attacks in London. This new scheme is something seperate to that, afaik, and so runs independently of it. Therefore, your comments are not relevant to the original post.

However, the security forces did have a role in the development of this new scheme :

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/politics/story/0,69 03,892001,00.html

That said, it's nice to get a bottle once in a while. You can use it to carry tap water in.

And from this Guardian article:

The problem is that, according to the recording industry, these sites are breaking the law. As Alan Dixon, general counsel of the London-based International Federation of the Phonograph Industry, says of Weblisten: "They have not less than six lawsuits pending against them, and two criminal proceedings. They are taking advantage of the way the Spanish legal system moves incredibly slowly: they have never been declared as legitimately distributing the plaintiff's recording."

The issue is that recorded music has three sets of rights to be argued over. The songwriter has the copyright to the song, the artist his own rights in it, and the record label and producers a third set. While these Russian and Spanish sites may be paying the songwriters, via a collection agency, they are acting without the permission of the other copyright holders.

The Russian sites claim that, under Russian law, foreign record labels releasing music in Russia give up their rights to prevent this. Not so, says Dixon. Such Soviet-era rules were rescinded under "article 47 paragraph 2 of the Russian Copyright Code" years ago. Downloading from such sites would be infringing both British and Russian copyright law, he says.

Well, putting aside the Mexican-American war, don't forget that General Pershing marched into Mexico with his troops in 1914 during the Mexican revolution. I don't think the US is on the verge of invading Mexico right now, but the Foreign Affairs crowd is much more concerned about Mexico than most people probably realize. Don't forget that Clinton bailed out their economy in 1995. Steve Forbes also called Mexican immigration a "safety valve for domestic dicontent in Mexico". For now massive illegal immigration, billion dollar bailouts and so forth have prevented problems needing more extreme measures from US business interests- although there has been militancy in Northern Mexico, as well as of course the Zapatistas in the South. US business interests would not allow these groups to take over, period.

I can assure you that the US had a very active hand in Italian politics after World War II, from the WWII invasion of Italy, to the 1948 elections to the 1960's and 1970's and beyond. PCI (the Italian Communist Party) won over one third of the vote in 1976, losing to the Christian Democrats by a few points, you can be sure that the US would not have sat back and watched an Italian socialist/communist coalition ally with the Warsaw pact, just as a communist revolution in France in May of 1968 would not have been allowed. As all of the diplomatic correspondence released afterward openly states.

These two articles seem really similar. The article at Technology Review has a bit more detail, and also covers Akamai well. Interesting as heck. But is the first page copied a bit, or plagiarized?

I'm going to go Google for some of those same sentences. ;-)

asked why they favour ID cards, the largest number (33 per cent) say because it will help prevent illegal immigration. Catching criminals is next (21 per cent), then helping you prove who you are (20 per cent), then prevention of identity theft, then consolidation of ID on one card, then prevention of terrorism (16 per cent).

On 14 September he blurted out a muddled sentence on the Today programme. The Government, he said, would have to consider 'how far anyone should expect to go in a democracy in being able to identify, being able to co-operate in terms of surveillance'. He returned to the Home Office to discover that the police and everyone else was against him. The 1997 Labour Government examined ID cards but decided, as Mike O'Brien, the former Home Office Minister, said, that they were 'unreliable in proving identity and damaged the relationship between the public and the police'. There were 'more effective things to spend our money on'.

The Guardian (and several other news outlets) report on the attempt by Professor Paulo Galluci and his team to build a working model of Leonard Da Vinci's clockwork powered car, designed in 1478.

Silly boy! Try to use the big-boy voice when you're talking to grown-ups.

Theocracy: the belief in government by divine guidance.

• Bush proclaimed June 10 as the official Texas state's "Jesus Day."
• Bush funds churches using state money under his thinly-veiled "Faith-based initiatives."
• Bush declares Jan 21 as a National Day of prayer and thanksgiving
• Ashcroft holds daily prayer meetings in government buildings during hours. And, like King David, was anointed with cooking oil.
• etc.

Unless their entire body is covered in this stuff, they're still partially exposed and you could probably still crack a rib with a large enough bullet. You'd have to have balls of steel not to want to return fire immediately.

Too illustrate my point, tanks don't have much to worry about snipers, yet in the heat of combat they'll accidentally take out a room full of reporters.

(Sorry I don't know how to highlight links)

<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,36 04,120 0272,00.html">The Link</a>

or

The Link

"the value of the publishing market in Japan is huge - last year saw sales of $22.6bn. Compare this with the $5.6bn spent on music and you'll see why ebooks have the potential to excite."

Further proof this product was oriented specifically to cut into Japan's paper book business:

The average book in Japan weighs 309g; we designed the LibriË to weigh 300g, including case and batteries

No wonder they don't advertise a free service like Project Gutenberg. It's almost like Micro$oft advertising you can run OpenOffice on Windows XP :)

And British tanks sometimes attack other British tanks. A battlefield is a very hectic, confusing place. 'Friendly fire' happens sometimes.

SOUTH ORANGE, New Jersey (AP) -- A sixth-grader was suspended after school officials accused him of threatening to expose a highly allergic teacher to peanut butter cookies, the boy's father said Thursday.

Loubert Gabriel said his son, 12-year-old Jules, had been kept out of class since April 2, after a girl in his social studies class at South Orange Middle School told the teacher that Jules had made the threat.

The father said Jules was carrying a snack packet of Nutter Butter cookies and did make a comment about having "something dangerous" but never said he had a weapon. "They mishandled this," Gabriel said.

Some interesting analysis - shame about your current troll moderation.

I do concur that Israel is happy with the way things are going, having intentionally misled its citizens (and by extension, the rest of the world) to support the us war effort. But I am not sure you can really say the US did it solely because Israel wanted it. How exactly could Israel have 'twisted the arm' of the US into entering a costly war? i can see some vague possibilities (Dubya wanted vengeance, so he was easy to push?), but they do seem unlikely. I know the neocons are vehemently pro-israel, but it still seems to be stretching things too much. Seems to me more like just an additional justification to get everyone on board...

I personally find the whole 'Iraq switching to the Euro for oil exports' thing to be a more likely primary cause, considering this administration did a similar attack (if much more low-key) on the newly Euro-friendly Venezuela.

OK, after a quick google, I found a mention, The basic federal tax rate for large corporations in the US is 35%. So, I think you are wrong, but anyway it doesn't change the main equation, which is that it only costs Microsoft $200,000 to donate $1 million 'worth' of software.

Nope, he was cremated. However, his brain could be spinning in its jar

Remember, this was the man that came up with some of the most complicated theories in modern physics,

... except that he plagiarized Dirac's works...

He used 'geddonken' experiments,

Gedankenexperimente, i.e. though experiments.

"Einstein would be rolling over in his grave if that were to happen."

I think He was cremated

"I want to be cremated, so people don't come to worship at my bones," he once said.

An interesting story if you don't already know it

> Actually, the US does have vast streches of forests (that are growing, not shrinking), though I wouldn't call them secret.

Over the last century the US has almost exactly 300 million hectar of forests. The US claimed in 2000 that their forests absorbs 310 million metric tons of CO2. In 1996, the US emitted 5.000 million metric tons of CO2. Hardly a net minus.

> One of the things the US wanted in Kyoto, but didn't get, was credit for CO2 absorbtion.

The Kyoto Protocol Article 3.3 gives credit for "afforestation, reforestation and deforestation since 1990".
And the fact that a (non-growing) forest absorbs CO2 seems to be a temporary effect. They can only puffer an additional amount of CO2.

I'll believe in man caused global warming when

a) We figure out why the amount of light we get from the sun is dimming. (10% in the last 30 years)Link
b) We figure out why the earth's spin is erratic. It slows down and speeds up for its own rhyme and reason.Link

The fact is that we are just along for the ride here. The notion that man is in control of the climate is laughable. This planet is not a stable, sublime, resort town. Mother Nature has a hell of a temper.

Hey, kidz, read below for more propaganda from
President-Vice Cheney's wife (Lynn):

Courtesy of The Guardian

Cheney's Wife Grilled by Third-Graders

Friday April 16, 2004 9:01 PM

By SOO-JEONG LEE

Associated Press Writer

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - Lynne Cheney, wife of Vice President Dick Cheney, faced some tough grilling Friday when she met American and South Korean third graders on a tour of a U.S. military base in Seoul.

Among the questions: ``Do you like America or Korea?'' and ``Did your husband ever fight in a war?''

Mrs. Cheney stopped in at the Seoul American Elementary School on the sprawling Yongsan Army Garrison in the South Korean capital to give a short history lesson from her 2002 book ``America: A Patriotic Primer.''

The visit, in which she talked about George Washington and the women's suffrage movement, was video-conferenced to other classrooms in the South Korean cities of Busan and Taegu.

During the brief question and answer session, Cheney replied that Korea was a ``wonderful country'' but that ``America is my country. I think there is something in all of us that loves our home.''

As for her husband's military record, she said: ``He was in college, so he did not fight in a war.''

But she was quick to add that the 63-year-old vice president, who got his bachelor's degree in 1965 and master's the following year, served as U.S. defense secretary and that ``he and I are both proud.'' Cheney served in that role from 1989 to 1993, directing the Gulf War.

The Cheneys were in South Korea on the last leg of an Asian tour with stops in Japan and China. They visited as South Koreans voted in parliamentary elections that produced a victory for impeached President Roh Moo-hyun. The U.S. vice president said the polls showed ``democracy is strong in the Republic of Korea.''

The United States keeps about 37,000 troops in South Korea, a legacy of the 1950-53 Korean War.

Seditiously,
Kilgore Trout

And I never said anything about what I thought about the war, or what I think Iraqis think about the war. You objected when the AC put words in your mouth, so don't do the same to others.

What's next? Text messages? Ring tones? The telegraph?

There was a study done recently with a group of 20 users who had never used a computer before. Ten were put at a Windows PC, 10 at a Linux PC and they were given a list of simple tasks like sending an e-mail, surfing to a Web page and the usability results were pretty much the same.

Yes, but did they do it with MONKEYS?

For the uninitiated, here's an excellent article from the Guardian describing what it's all about.

The Guardian also had an article on how these things seem to be popular only in cricket-playing parts of the world (Britain, Australia/New Zealand, the Indian subcontinent, the Caribbean, South Africa). Both pastimes take forever to complete (but the pleasure is in the process of playing rather than in the end result), both involve arcane rules that seem incomprehensible to the uninitiated, both depend heavily on convention and gentlemanly conduct. The link is subscriber-only, though.

For the uninitiated, here's an excellent article from the Guardian describing what it's all about.

The Guardian also had an article on how these things seem to be popular only in cricket-playing parts of the world (Britain, Australia/New Zealand, the Indian subcontinent, the Caribbean, South Africa). Both pastimes take forever to complete (but the pleasure is in the process of playing rather than in the end result), both involve arcane rules that seem incomprehensible to the uninitiated, both depend heavily on convention and gentlemanly conduct. The link is subscriber-only, though.

Have a look at the bottom of this article to see typical cricket statistics for a day's play. And that is just in a newspaper, not on a statistical website.

While I don't know the credibility of their "experts", the experts vs. officials notion vaguely reminds me of the oh-so-many ways the Bush administration ignores experts hmm? ;-)

In all seriousness, I'd love to see it happen, or at least get more discussion going on realistic WAYS to make it happen sooner, safer, and cheaper. I seem to recall reading that one of the obstacles was figuring out how to provide enough food and oxygen for the long trip... it would make sense to have an onboard garden of some sort, to help with both. IMVHO it will also be important to really collaborate with scientists all over the world and pool everyone's knowledge and resources. (AFTER we've got things on our own planet a little more stable, of course.) I don't know if a manned Mars mission could be done with quite the same "we're gonna get there first, nyah nyah!" mentality as the early space race.

On a side note, I read one of the titles at the bottom as "Peru excavates 1,500 tourists from Inca ruins" and said WHAAAA?

They say that sea levels will rise due to the greenhouse effect...perhaps keeping it up would be a good thing.

Or perhaps we could all just set sai like this.

Desalination would be vital if you live in a floating city. If the world's population continues to grow then not only does this provide more living space, but more 'farm land' too.

But then again, I've been writing PHP code solidly for the last two days and I'm feeling kind of trippy. So perhaps the best course of action would be to make the US approve Kyoto after all.

It seems like most people who claim to oppose genetic modification of foods, plants, etc. are basing their views mostly on fears rather than any solid evidence.

Tell us that when Scotts sues you for lawn piracy. I don't think you understand what the hoopla is about, so I'll explain in terms /.'ers will find familiar :-) Worries about bioengineering are not limited to food safety. One of the goals of the biotech companies is to develop a terminator gene. DRM for seed. Prevent the seed from growing into plants that create more seed that will germinate. Maybe 6 generation termination. Whatever suits their licensing fancy. Now imagine that terminator gene cross pollenating and getting into the general grass gene pool (Stuff happens. GM genes even jump species. BT Corn genes have been found in other species of grass. Even bacteria assimilate GM genes). Oops, we just killed all the grass in America, but that's OK. We have a fresh supply of Scotts brand grass to make your lawn green again! And remember kids, Scotts brand grass will only grow with Scotts brand fertilizer and pesticides! Ok, that is a gross over simplification, but you get the idea. If you think this is just irrational fear, I suggest some reading on the subject. Genetic Engineering != Selective Breeding.